The Digital Lives Of Others

To be or not to be an online Anon? Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Gonzalo Lira, Richard Hanania, and Worldcoin Orbs.

Your digital life can and will be used against you. A treatise in defense of the essential rights of online Anons.

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Answers to the question concerning online anonymity are often fraught with appeals to emotions, argued on behalf of one’s self-interested outcome, this piece and its author notwithstanding.

Those who have dispelled the protections of anonymity, with or without prior deliberation of the foreseeable consequences, want others to join in their short-sighted risk and sacrifice.

Often they have failed to recognize the clear merging of corporate tech companies with government surveillance agencies and the permanence of all the data (converted from psycho-social and physical human labor) they are extracting and collecting on all citizens.

The extent of this operation goes much deeper than mere geolocation positioning or the capture of attitudes and opinions online. This is total psycho-social-political profiling, not just to mold human behavior in the present moment but to move the digital swarm (the collective of online users that migrate to the popular views prepared in advance of major events) in one direction so that their actions and reactions can be anticipated for future outcomes.

When downloading and installing a new app on any device, users are defacto agreeing to be surveilled 24/7 by the corporation behind the application. With a data-centric system of technological incentivization, companies must scoop as much of the gold bytes and bits as they can to disrupt an industry and justify their valuation to investors and shareholders whose only important metric is this: How many millions of people are you spying on regularly and how much dirt do you have on them?

They utilize polite euphemisms like monthly active users (MAUs) and daily active users (DAUs) to gauge their worth, but these are really just metrics for humans that have agreed to dispense with privacy, anonymity, and autonomy and to have their brains and energy pilfered by the Silicon Valley machine only interested in attention extraction for manipulation, exploitation, and monetary conversion. Since the beginning of Surveillance Valley’s origins, Governments have injected their tentacles into these digital pilfering operations.

The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.

— Benito Mussolini
The Doctrine of Fascism (1935)

The merger into a fascist system of total surveillance began in secret not long after the Internet emerged as a preferred tool for information, communication, and socialization. The opportunities for exploitation in the concealment of truth and to manage perceptions and minds proved irresistible. One could argue that was the entire motive of the digital revolution—to distract, surveil, manage, and control the masses at ever-increasing speeds with increasingly deceptive sophisticated algorithms.

The revelation of this merger and suspicions about this system was first piqued with room 641A (NSA/AT&T affair) and confirmed on June 14, 2013, with the first publication of the Snowden files. That the first few Snowden stories appeared in mockingbird outlets The Guardian and Washington Post only enhanced apprehensions that the entire disclosure was a limited hangout to confirm for the masses what they already presumed.

It might as well have been a confession by five-eyes surveillance states: Yes, we’re collecting all your digital data and spying on you all the time with the help of tech companies you trust. So, what the hell are you going to do about it?

The masses answered emphatically with a collective yawn, a consent to future totalitarian transgressions. If that sounds like victim-blaming, how can those who do not resist or rebel be victims of what they’ve been told is being done to them? Passivity and inaction are always interpreted by those with power over others as consent to continue acts of transgression.

People went right along tweeting their brains out and liking nonsense on Facebook. Silicon Valley social engineers, trained in behavioral nudging through addicting users with neurological rewards, declared exactly the outcome they had engineered through the gamification of digital life, formerly known as evolving human social relations: See, we told you privacy is dead.

The masses couldn’t be bothered to respond. They knew the forces of technological solutionism were immolating their privacy and went right back to chasing their digital soma.

The outliers, heretics, rebels, and tuned-in skeptics saw this as a turning point toward blindly tripping into a world of dystopian authoritarianism. Awake and aware, they went right to work building new systems, creating tools like VPNs, dedicated servers, and peer-to-peer encryption that could last until the race for quantum computing overrode their capabilities, buying the privacy-minded digital sleuths time to build stronger systems against what they saw as inevitable creeping digital tyranny.

To be free from their system of entrapment, to liberate oneself from this globally interconnected digital gulag requires the conscious and continuous pursuit of privacy. One must desire privacy, and actively seek it. The ultimate gateway to privacy online is anonymity.

The concept of privacy is not dead, as some would like to proclaim for their own nefarious agenda. It is very much alive and well in the conscious digital consumer who knows with each touch of a screen they are merely providing the reserve data labor collected by powerful enemies that may one day use it all against them, either through extortion or in a reinvented world where the social rituals and digital norms of the past are suddenly rendered punishable crimes.

They take all precautions necessary to remain private: de-googling phones and tablets, using open source software, never providing their real name to any tech service, never using any service that they know can and will be used against them in the future, darkening out cameras, and deactivating microphones that are always on and always listening to background conversations to tailor advertising impressions based on those private background conversations.

We now live in a world where people voluntarily bug their homes with devices that begin with the word “smart”. They bug their cars, and their jeans pockets with devices that forty years ago would have made the work of Stasi foot soldiers effortless in the DDR.

If the masters of the universe tell the masses that privacy is dead, it’s not because they want it to be dead, it’s because the unthinking masses have consented to the decree and endorsed it with their own foolish behavior.

WEF spokesbot Yuval Harari: “The concept of privacy will no longer exist.”

For a decade or longer many of these assertions about digital surveillance and lack of privacy have been labeled hyperbolic or paranoid, usually by venture capitalist bettors, or their media mouthpieces whose wallets depend on continuing this dystopian system of technological obliteration of civil liberties.

Where the permanence of our past digital lives meets the world of total surveillance for total control, everything you once liked, retweeted, shared, commented on, photographed, filmed, or said, can and will be used against you in the future. Indeed, we’ve already arrived at a world where one’s past digital transgressions can cost them their jobs, social status, fans, followers, friends, family, bank accounts, and ability to participate in society.

Ask Dr. Joseph Mercola or Nigel Farage who were both “de-banked” for simply holding anti-establishment views that countered official orthodoxies. Ask the Canadian truckers whose bank accounts were seized for daring to demand an end to lockdowns and restoration of bodily autonomy for medical choices. The examples of Venmo, PayPal, and other financial actors banning users for having the wrong ideas or beliefs are endless, many of them never gaining publicity.

Wrongthink is now officially, financially punishable. Soon the costs of digital transgressions may be one’s freedom, and life. In many countries including Ukraine, it already is.

To desire anonymity online is to take necessary precautions against creeping totalitarian tyranny. Often this claim is met with accusations of cowardice and shame, by those with fortunes large enough to offset the consequences of not being anonymous. Their chants are predictably obtuse.

Show your face! Tell us your real name if you really believe in fighting the system!

You will know Anons either by their foresight of the future digital dystopia the world is racing towards or by their financial worth. The vast majority cannot afford to reveal themselves online, lest they sacrifice whatever measly income they subsist on, derived from a private company or the public sector.

That’s not to say they are all poor, they simply aren’t financially protected for a life that can afford security, isolation, frequent movement, private travel, multiple passports, and the general insulation from the consequences of digital wrong think in a globally interconnected world of fascist governments working against their desire for liberty.

Though even drowning in riches no longer insulates individuals from the Empire of Lies and her obedient vassal states like Ukraine, Poland, and Romania.

Gonzalo Lira’s actions are often called brave and courageous. But what did he really accomplish by getting himself locked up for years? If he were honest about how he spent two years in a neo-Nazi vassal state criticizing its poison dwarf dictator and his neocon war monger financiers in the District of Corruption, he would admit his actions were anything but bright.

Based on his five-figure monthly Patreon income he could have afforded to do the very same thing from Budapest or Novi Sad without the predictable outcome he manifested in Kharkiv, and continued to do it for the years that he’ll now spend in a Ukro-Nazi dungeon, possibly getting tortured.

Even upon his latest run for the Hungarian border (two years too late) he couldn’t resist filming himself for Twitter and Telegram dispatches, advertising his exact geolocation to Victoria Nuland and her Nazi-loving Posse. Apparently, he tried to cross into Hungary with his motorcycle at an official checkpoint instead of through the woods under the cover of darkness.

What is the true cost of crossing that Rubicon to reveal one’s identity online?

What amount of financial security can offset the societal and psychological consequences brought by the angry weaponized mob enforcers who do not like the official narrative to be revealed as grotesque lies and propaganda?

How much of one’s life (ideas, moments, memories, beliefs, aspirations) are worth sharing with the world for fleeting neurological rewards that will be captured as data and used to profile individuals for corporate state monitoring until death do them part?

Even great wealth has proven insufficient to protect some individuals.

Andrew Tate claims a net worth of $300 million, though it’s probably closer to a quarter or less than that as he lives in a million-dollar contemporary home in a middling suburb of Bucharest.

He appears likable, perceptive, and intelligent, his digital sales pitch is noble: reject the toxic forces of woke, for health, wealth, and independence (beyond the hyper-masculine clickbait). And yet a few insults targeting a Swedish autistic marionette fronting the global climate hoax on Twitter last December were enough to land him and his brother in a Romanian clink for 90 days with zero charges and apparently a feverish hunt for witnesses and evidence.

Lavrentiy Beria, the most ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and Eastern Europe, bragged that he could prove criminal conduct on anyone, especially the innocent. His famous saying was, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Tate has since learned his lesson and now spends his time using his incarceration (target of the Matrix’s agents) to enhance his digital brand, proclaiming he’s ever more in tune with The Matrix and its agents while holding his hands together in his lap for long interviews, in a formation commonly known as an Illuminati signal.

Is Tate ready to play ball with “The Matrix”? Was a deal made to drop charges to amplify him as a messenger and popular figure for controlling minds?

Is he conscious of his hand symbol, or clueless? If conscious he’s signaling to his masters, if clueless, he has no inkling what the Matrix is and he’s a con man.

Conscious or clueless about hand signals? Either way, his brand loses.

If Tate really had a $300 million net worth, why spend time streaming online with young YouTubers drooling at his every word and form an online University to guide young desperate, and broke men for $49.99 per month, and go out of his way to become a celebrity figure and the most Googled man of 2022?

People with tremendous wealth usually do not seek out the spotlight. People who are not financially secure but want to increase their wealth, and need their face and embodied being as the sales tool to facilitate that wealth increase are often not as well off as they perform for their digital swarm.

One would think that kind of money would have permitted Tate a life of privacy, anonymity, and security wherever he wanted. Was seeking digital celebrity, and the attention of others really worth getting his name moved to the top of the list for digital transgressors and 90 days in a Romanian jail cell?

His cult of followers would certainly defend him as a courageous figure with the guts to fight the powers that be, for helping young men with no father figures against ubiquitous feminization and celebrated misandry.

Yet he couldn’t even anticipate the effect his own words and actions online would have against him. He didn’t even appear to know who or what those powers were capable of if he crossed one of their lines—mocking an autistic Swedish marionette. He assumed incorrectly, that his presumed innocence really mattered to Romanian authorities.

Seeking privacy is increasingly frowned upon by corporate and state actors who must operate under the pre-crime assumption that those who seek privacy do so with the intention of concealing their felonious behavior.

Governments and their corporate partners have been so successful in programming the minds of their subjects to repeat this talking point that any behavior that cannot be tracked and traced is met with suspicion and innuendo by their armies of indoctrinated foot soldiers.

To request to be paid in cash is simply one of many examples. In transacting between citizens (non-business entities) the request is often followed by a question the system has programmed them to reflexively respond with: Why does this person want cash? What are they hiding?

Cash is privacy. Cash is autonomy. Cash insulates the financial activities of citizens from the criminally invasive eyes of big government meddlers that want to know every activity of every citizen at every minute of the day.

The request to be paid in cash should be reflexively celebrated and instinctually rewarded by fellow citizens who value liberty. There should be no questions, only commendation and agreement to transact in a private and autonomous manner free from banking and government systems of surveillance. The equivalent of cash in crypto would be privacy coins (Monero, ZCash) and should be encouraged for online transactions everywhere.

Mutually reinforced liberty can only persist with mutually reinforced endorsements of privacy, and in the digital age that must include anonymity. Attitudes must flourish that we are all inextricably linked by the rights of our neighbors or fellow digital users, regardless of our opinions of theirs. If the rights of one man can be suspended, then there are no rights for any man.

Thomas Paine expressed as much in The Rights Of Man, “It's an understanding that the erosion of liberty anywhere is a threat to liberty everywhere.”

Richard Hanania holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and fronts his own “think tank” center at the University of Texas. In a piece on Substack in April, he called for the removal of all online anonymity for those who want to participate on Substack because he believes it would enhance his experience on the platform.

His piece oozes with the academic snobbery and elitism that encapsulate insulated self-satisfying reactions to important questions of digital privacy.

For these reasons, I’ve always dreamed of a Twitter with a minimum IQ requirement. Or, more importantly, a way to filter out the hateful and intellectually lazy; the stupid and curious are much more tolerable. With the rolling out of Notes, I hope that it’s finally here.

Is Richard being stupid or intellectually lazy when he concludes his post with the following?

…one thing I hope that Substack will consider is creating the option of not having to interact with anonymous accounts through a real verification system. A lot of right-wingers associate anonymity with freedom and the ability to avoid being punished by censorious employers. But much more often, it’s used to hide behavior that people would be cancelled or ostracized for in real life for good reason.

Because of a few people (Richard calls them Riff-Raff) that hide untoward behavior online that would have real-life consequences, EVERYONE needs to sacrifice their privacy and anonymity so that said Riff-Raff can be smoked out of their mommy’s basements.

And when did espousing the ideas of liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, and John Locke become the talk of “right-wingers”? Perhaps that’s merely a commentary on how “far left” the political spectrum has shifted, especially with indoctrinated younger generations.

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I left Hanania a polite yet critical comment below his post. Richard later proceeded to block me here on Substack for a snarky reply to one of his snobbish notes about “contributing to the conversation”. My first and only block from another writer.

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Is the solution to abolish the privacy, autonomy, and therefore liberty of human individuals behind online accounts in order to “enhance the conversation” according to the preference of academic nobs like Hanania?

Richard wants to have total control over the conversations he engages in, and he wants it done at the platform level because individual controls are insufficient. This is nothing more than a pretentious and pompous concealment of what is a backdoor call for more banning and censorship.

Jordan Peterson has espoused the same asinine justifications, attaching to the assertion of his own self-satisfying psychobabble “dark tetrad types” regarding the individuals behind anonymous accounts. He appealed to Elon Musk to ban anonymous accounts when he took over Twitter. Musk knows better. If only verified users were permitted it would ruin the platform overnight.

What is a dark tetrad type?

On Bill Maher’s podcast, Peterson recently said, "There is a very high correlation between the dark tetrad personality traits (psychopathic, machiavellian, narcissistic, sadistic) and left-wing authoritarianism."

Wait, what?

Anons are justified by right-wingers seeking liberty, yet psycho-socially left-wing authoritarians?

Let’s call the whole thing off.

If neither Ph.D. holder in Peterson or Hanania has been schooled in the finer points of liberty, autonomy, and privacy, perhaps the emergence of Silicon Valley’s latest rising droid Sam Altman (CEO Chat GPT), and his Worldcoin biometric retinal scanning orb will convince them that anonymity is not just valid, but now essential.

So far over 1.7 million people absolute morons around the world have offered their retina or iris to the Worldcoin orb in exchange for a few Altman sheckles.

When are these nerds going to learn that only idiots believe them? Perhaps they know that’s all they’ve ever needed to onboard their new dystopian gadgets—a world drowning in idiocy.

It’s no coincidence that Altman has been chosen to help front the Worldcoin scam. Artificial Intelligence and online bots are now being pushed as justification to completely abolish online anonymity.

How are we supposed to know if you are human or machine?

The question should really be:

Since when do the rights of machines override the rights of humans, and why are you engineering this world for humanity?

If by now the Petersons and Hananias cannot see where all this is going, if they are either too stupid or already corrupted by the powers that want to abolish any conceptions of digital privacy, or if they simply cannot understand the value and worth of championing and defending the anonymity and right of individual fellow humans to be anonymous online then we are all headed to a very dark reset.

And as always it will be the digitally vanquished crypto-anarchist tech-savvy heretics and rebels who will have to fight and innovate creatively to destroy this coming system in order to save everyone from the tyranny they failed to see arresting them in their rearview mirror.

Lord it’s a damn shame
What the world’s gotten to
For people like me
And people like you

Wish I could just wake up
And it not be true
But it is, oh it is
Living in a new world
With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think
Wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know
But I know that you do

Cause’ your dollar ain’t shit
And it’s taxed to no end
Cause’ of rich men
North of Richmond

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